


Our Doubts Are Traitors

by J_Baillier



Series: Care And Companionship [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Caregiving, Depression, Developing Relationship, Don't copy to another site, Eventual Romance, First Time, M/M, Medical Realism, POV Natalia Mullan, Physical Disability, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 09:07:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21241616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_Baillier/pseuds/J_Baillier
Summary: The events from John's departure from Greece to the final chapters of "Proving A Point", as narrated by Tallie.





	Our Doubts Are Traitors

**Author's Note:**

> [[an index and guide to all my Sherlock stories](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25011148)]

Tallie was used to his silences by now. They had never been oppressive or expectant — no, when Sherlock Holmes wanted to withdraw from the world, he retreated so deep into his own head that he affected the mood of a room no more than a statue.

That familiar state of non-being was what Tallie had expected after John Watson walked away from Sherlock's life after the Greek mystery of Jorja Williams' death was solved. Yet instead, she found herself facing with something very new: a Sherlock who couldn’t even find solace in his own thoughts. It seemed that the bridge John had helped construct for him to rejoin the world was so sturdy that it firmly anchored him to that devastating pain of loss, and the only way out was a plunge off the proverbial edge. And that plunge was what Tallie now feared Sherlock would continue to plan in the form of the Dignitas plan. Tallie and her employer had agreed that there was little point in rescheduling their flights back. Whether they were in Greece or back in England, it hardly mattered — John was gone, and Tallie could read in Mycroft Holmes' tone that the older brother had realised the gravity of that fact.

Sherlock was silent as Tallie pushed the narrow wheelchair specially designed for use inside airplanes through their arrival gate towards the shopping area. Their checked-in baggage would be delivered by a courier service to Musgrave Court, and they had nothing to declare at customs, so all they had to do is have their passports checked. Instead of emanating the bristling annoyance and embarrassment which have marked his public appearances since the accident, Sherlock managed the ensuing formalities with minimum fuss and minimal verbal engagement, eerily business-like and calm. Tallie disliked it and feared the reasons. Before, Sherlock had relied on her to be the shield between him and the rest of the world — always curious about the circumstances of a young, handsome man in a power wheelchair. Then, John had slowly carved a path into Sherlock's favour and then into his heart. Slowly, gently, carefully, Sherlock had begun to trust that John wouldn't lead him into situations that would embarrass or hurt him, and had allowed John to encourage him to experiment with gaining the necessary confidence for more self-reliance. He'd become more open, more spontaneous, more expressive of his emotions but now, it was hard once again for Tallie to read him, impossible to decide how much of those good things, of that progress still remained.

Sherlock hadn't spoken a word about John since the night Tallie had found the latter crying in the hotel bar, and she hadn't pressed the issue. When Mycroft had called her the next day to ask if their plane tickets should be reissued, she'd asked Sherlock for his opinion, and he had declared he didn't care a whit. He also didn't want to speak to his brother on the phone. Neither he nor Tallie hardly enjoyed their remaining 36 hours on Rhodes, but at least the weather was better than in High Wycombe. Sherlock didn't want to leave his room, didn't want to eat. Tallie had seen him go without for days before, and knew how vulnerable the man's appetite was to his moods. It also seemed as though Sherlock could just somehow push out his appetite from his mind when he was working, to decide that it was a frivolity he shouldn't indulge in. Tallie had been terribly impressed with John for getting him to enjoy such things again, and making it look easy to change the mind of a man Tallie had never met a rival for in stubbornness.

______________

  
To her surprise, Mycroft Holmes was waiting for them outside the terminal, a familiar van idling in front of the terminal in a handicapped spot. Tallie had rarely seen her employer traveling in it with Sherlock save for hospital visits.

"What are you doing here?" Sherlock asked him after granting his brother barely a glance.

"Courtesy call. How was your working holiday?" Mycroft stepped aside so that Sherlock could position his chair on the lift ramp.

"Don't be tedious," Sherlock spat at him, and Tallie found herself glad for the angry energy suddenly radiating from the man instead of the stoic silence of an automaton.

In the car, Mycroft kept asking questions which, to someone unaccustomed to the kinds of communication games the Holmes brothers played, would have seemed dull and polite. Tallie had learned by now that trite, self-evident inquiries from his employer were designed to deliberately irritate and coax forth a reaction which would slip by Sherlock's defences.

"I am sorry," Mycroft phrased carefully just as they drove through the estate gates, "For the way things have turned out. You should not blame yourself."

After months and months of hearing Mycroft Holmes dole out unsolicited and frequently quite condescending advice to his younger brother about how Sherlock should or shouldn't be conducting his life and how he should be taking responsibility for his well-being and rehabilitation, this statement surprised Tallie. Judging by Tallie's final conversation with the man, John _did _blame Sherlock for what had happened. He refused to accept what he saw as Sherlock's unfair stubbornness, because John still didn't quite seem to see the fear and lack of self-confidence and exhaustion and depression behind it, none of which really was Sherlock's fault. Tallie had thought long and hard before voicing her concerns about John getting too emotionally involved, before warning him about diving in too deep. She wasn't opposed to those things, per se — no, what she worried about was the fact that John didn't seem to have the mental equilibrium to handle the realities of Sherlock's life. Like Mycroft, he wouldn't let Sherlock die, but John also wouldn't let him live the way he wanted. And that just meant Sherlock remained trapped precisely in what John had wanted to liberate him from.

John Watson had achieved the impossible in getting Sherlock to reconsider his options. But, in Tallie's opinion, Sherlock had turned out to be the realist out of the two of them — the one more capable of facing the darkness which would now be gathering in the corners of the annexe, heavier than ever.  
  


______________

A few days later, Tallie found him staring at the ceiling in the morning, eyes red-rimmed and the tell-tale signs of insomnia drawing dark shadows under his eyes. She leaned in to help him raise into a sitting position, and the movement seemed to make him shift out of his thoughts back to reality. He flinched when she laid a hand on his shoulder, then glared at her. The alarmed fury in his gaze made her retreat.

"Morning," she said. "Ready to get up?" Normally, she never asked; they'd developed a routine, a well-honed choreography where they both knew what to expect and what their roles were.

"No."

"Alright. Want your tablet?"

"No."

Her glance swept the vicinity for his phone, which should have been on the bed next to him or slotted into the attachment arm jutting out of the side of his bedside cabinet. The iPhone was always close by, in case Sherlock needed something during the night.

Now, it was nowhere to be seen. "Where's your mobile?"

He drew a deep breath, averted his gaze. This struck Tallie as odd.

She knelt down, looking for the device underneath the bed. After several minutes of searching, she finally found it behind the armchair John had usually occupied in the evenings. She couldn't come up with any manner in which it could have ended up in such a strange, narrow spot except that Sherlock had thrown it.

As she picked it up, her finger accidentally brushed up against the home button, and the screen lit up, revealing a notification of '_1 missed call: John Watson_'.

Her first reaction was relief, but then it occurred to her to wonder why Sherlock hadn't answered. Why would he throw the phone away, instead? John had been the one to storm out, to get angry when Sherlock had raised the subject of Switzerland. Tallie would have assumed that Sherlock would have wanted nothing more than for John to get in touch again.

She turned back around to face him and sat down at the foot of the bed. "John's tried to call you."

There was no answer, but Sherlock's breathing picked up. He used the bed remote to bring himself into a nearly sitting position, began fingering the edge of the duvet nervously.

"Do you want me to get him on the line for you?" Tallie suggested Maybe Sherlock had thrown the phone before the call from John had even happened. She knew that he sometimes put his phone on silent during the night, so he may not even have heard it ringing.

"Leave me alone."

As he repeated the first words that he'd ever spoken to her, Sherlock's eyes were looking at nothing in particular behind her.

She put down the offending phone on the duvet. "Have you tried to call John? Message him?"

"Don't––" Sherlock warned, then snapped his mouth shut. His expression was a mixture of resentment and misery.

_Don't what?_ Tallie wondered. _Don't try to give me hope? Don't try to get John back?_

She squared her shoulders. This wasn't the worst crap morning she'd spent with Sherlock; she could handle whatever he threw her way, emotion-wise. She liked to think she'd seen it all; the first three months in the house had exhausted her and nearly drained her considerable empathy resources. "I think the two of you should really try to talk again. John wouldn't have been that upset if he didn't care. He wouldn’t have tried to give you a ring if he didn't want to see you again."

"It wouldn't change anything. He doesn't understand. Nobody does, except for you."

Tallie had often second-guessed her decision to support Sherlock when it came to ending his life. Now, she regretted it more than ever, because she couldn't let go of the hope that things had changed for the better. John had managed to make her question her convictions; John given _her_ hope, too. Could she have done more to support John's efforts? Perhaps, but she could also see how badly John had struggled and how terribly he had compromised himself to make a difference, to change Sherlock's mind.

"It's not something you can just explain once, and the other person will come around. He needs time to process it, to hear you out," Tallie suggested.

"He's had plenty of time to _process things_, and you've all helped him lie to me. He's the same as everyone else."

She placed a hand on his duvet-covered knee; though he could hardly feel it, he was looking at her hand. She knew he rarely tolerated casual touches from anyone but John, but she had sensed that she’d been granted an exception status. After all, no one touched him as much as she did as they moved through their daily routines. No one also touched him as intimately as she had to, and awareness of this made her want to make the effort to make it feel as comfortable and pleasant and natural as she could. One of the things she had noticed John clearly wrestling with was deciding how much to involve himself in Sherlock's physical care. A part of him seemed to want to do it, yet a part of him wanted to stay detached out of some confusion over his precise role in Sherlock’s life. What that role was seemed to have changed as he and Sherlock got to know each other better. There was usually no unease, little to no embarrassment between Tallie and Sherlock as she did her duties. When John helped him, it had always been very different, but recently, she had picked up on a positive, expectant, excited undertone there which seemed to affect the atmosphere in any room the two men were in together.

Tallie had never exaggerated when she had voiced to John how important he was becoming to Sherlock and it was odd how oblivious John seemed to be to that change. Every time she'd said something to that effect, she had done so with the hope that John would take that information to heart and be very careful about wielding it. Sometimes he had acted like a bull in a china shop but sometimes, John had been able to read Sherlock better than anyone in the world. Sometimes, only John could say the right thing or do just the perfect thing.

"He's not coming back, is he?" Sherlock asked, and the inquiry sounded rhetorical. "He doesn't understand, so why would he stay?" He seemed genuinely perplexed by these questions. Tallie thought she picked up an undertone of shock there — as though the fact that John had left was still reverberating.

"Why would anyone stay?" He asked, now breathing hard, forehead creasing as he fought the onslaught of emotion. "Why would _I _stay?" He asked, then gasped hard for air. 

Tallie's palms gripping his shoulders were soon the only thing keeping Sherlock upright as he pressed the heels of his palms on his closed lids, then let his palm trail down his face to conceal his eyes entirely. He was hyperventilating, shaking with the force of his loss and Tallie had no words to offer; they would have been like raising an umbrella against an approaching hurricane.

______________

When Tallie got home that night and opened her laptop to check if there were any changes to her lecture schedules — lectures she was unlikely to attend that week since Mycroft had asked her to commit to extra hours — there was one received email. But, instead of being from the Advanced Clinical Practitioner program of the Buckinghamshire New University, it was from Sherlock. It contained no personal note, just forwarded electronic flight tickets for three persons.

Heathrow to Zurich. The first of June.

_Switzerland. Dignitas._

She'd sworn she wouldn't do this, swore she wouldn't get in as deep as John had, but seeing those tickets crumpled what remained of her determined hope. Two hours later, when she dragged herself to the shower with her nose stuffy and her head pounding, her anger towards John had turned into desperation.

_He has to come back._

______________

And come back John did.

Tallie couldn't decide whether she was surprised or not; John had always been hard to predict. In those early days, when he had been a strange contrast of a doctor and something almost as brittle as Sherlock, John had kept himself closed up tightly as though the gentlest of prodding into his emotional state would have brought the whole façade tumbling down. Only after John had found out about Dignitas had the real Captain John H. Watson emerged from behind the safety blanket of his own tragedy. The two of them growing close had posed a danger for both — a danger plain to see for everyone except the two involved. The end of their relationship could have been the end of Sherlock. Tallie wasn't certain whether she could have forgiven John for it. 

_We're all in this too deep, _she thought, wiping away tears as she watched through the window of Sherlock's ITU room as John kissed his knuckles and whispered things meant for only the two men in the room to hear. They were all in too deep, but only John taking the plunge right down to the bottom and realising that not even the fear of loss couldn't keep him away had achieved the impossible: Sherlock had changed his mind.

Sometimes Tallie suspected he had changed it pretty early on, judging by the looks the two men had been giving each other even before Greece when they thought nobody was watching. But none of that mattered, now.

  
______________

When Sherlock was discharged, it was hard to even believe he was the same man Tallie had met at Hobbs over a year prior. He'd gained weight — still a bit under what he should have been for his height, but his cheekbones no longer looked like the work of some artist depicting the Irish famine. He was suddenly excited about his work, took interest in his appearance and went on _dates_. That concert night before Greece had been a big thing for him; he'd barked orders at Tallie when they were dressing him up, almost neurotic about getting things just right. '_Would he like this?_' he had asked Tallie, tugging at the sleeve of one of his suit ensembles where he barely fit into the walk-in wardrobe in his chair. He had sounded as though he desperately needed her opinion even though she couldn't have any more insight into the tastes of John Watson than Sherlock himself did. Gone were the days of Frimley and the likes when Sherlock's sartorial choices were governed by indifference and a need to hide. No, on that concert night, he definitely wanted to be noticed — by one man in particular.

John had been a sight to behold, too. The man obviously wasn't much of a fancy dresser, but of course Tallie couldn't know whether that was due to finances or lack of interest. He had emerged from his bedroom in a beautiful suit adorned with red details, and Sherlock had stared and stared and _stared _so hard Tallie had worried he'd sprain something. That had been the start of it all, she suspected. The concert night seemed to have led to Sherlock and John accepting and beginning to more openly signal that their mutual enjoyment of the other's company wasn't just friendship. Once Sherlock was recovered from his pneumonia and the matter of Switzerland was settled, Tallie expected things to move forward between them, but it seemed that the pace the two men had chosen to pursue a change in their relationship was glacial.

Which is why Tallie had nearly choked on her tea when Sherlock asked for sex. 

Well, not sex per se, but for assistance with pursuing it with someone else. Tallie had had such a request before from a client, which is why the scenario wasn’t entirely outlandish. That client had eventually ended up hiring a professionally trained sexual surrogate, and Tallie declining to provide such services thankfully hadn't affected their working relationship. She'd worked with the man — a former member of the motorcycle police who'd been involved in a crash during chase resulting in a traumatic brain injury and a C2-level spinal injury — for two years before he moved to Canada.

After a momentary speechlessness, Tallie was relieved to discover that the person Sherlock was planning on being with was not her but John. Not only was she relieved, but also terribly happy for him. Tallie knew John had been out with a woman once during his time at the Court, which — together with how stagnant the progress of his relationship with John had become — had made her sceptical about things advancing into intimacy between the two. But, it seemed that John had no qualms about such a development.

_I shouldn't have doubted this would happen_, Tallie thought as she turned on the shower in the annexe bathroom and adjusted the temperature. The looks John and Sherlock had been sharing in the past few days could have made concrete smoulder.

Sherlock had just presented to her a list — an actual list typed up on his tablet — of preparations he wished to undertake. He approached the topic of sex just like he approached everything else: with scientific curiosity, a frighteningly intense determination and an odd and endearing air of clueless overthinking.

She picked up the printed list from a bathroom side table just as Sherlock made his way back to the bedroom.

"Have you read it?" He asked, tone demanding.

"As long as you're not asking me to bleach anything," Tallie joked, laughing as she perused the list.

Sherlock frowned. "Excuse me? Is that a… thing? Would John expect––"

"God, no. _No_. Forget it. Delete it," Tallie compelled him. She should have known better than to assume he'd be able to understand the humour. "You have to stop worrying. All John's going to probably do is have a three-minute shower and splash on some aftershave. He's not expecting you to do anything elaborate. People do just go and have sex without itemised preparation lists, you know."

"I'm perfectly aware," Sherlock replied indignantly. "If some people choose to approach this without any consideration to hygiene or making sure their partner isn't put off by… things, then that's their problem and not mine."

"You've talked about this with John, haven't you? Talked about what to do with the catheter, what you can feel and can't feel, safe practices and all that?"

"Not as such, but research has been done by both."

Tallie pursed her lips and helped Sherlock remove his shirt. "Has he had a partner before who had a disability?"

"I think not, but when it comes to lacking experience, he's not the one with the problem. I presume at least some of his experience on how to move things forward is applicable."

Tallie hid her grin behind a rolled-up towel. Sherlock made it sound like they were going to spread out a detailed manual with a numbered process and go through it bit by bit.

"Alright, then. Defer to his expertise and stop thinking too much," she laughed.

"I can't stop thinking on cue," Sherlock complained. "Nobody can."

"Trust me," Tallie said, helping Sherlock unbuckle his belt, "When you’re at it with someone you like, thinking becomes a bit less important."

Sherlock looked unconvinced, and his frown didn't disappear when Tallie lifted him off the seat so that his trousers and underwear could be removed. She transferred him to the shower chair, arranged him under the spray so that it wouldn't hit his face, and picked up the pair of scissors from the cupboard. "Now, about that trim you wanted…?"

**——— The End ———**

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a quote from The Bard. Much gratitude is deserved by betas Elldotsee and 88thparallel.


End file.
